MOVIE REVIEW: 'Like Father, Like Son" explores a moral quandary

Friday

Feb 14, 2014 at 3:00 AM

"Like Father, Like Son” is another of Japanese writer/director Koreeda Hirokazu's films that examine the family.

By Brett MichelFor The Patriot Ledger

Common to many of 51-year-old Japanese writer/director Koreeda Hirokazu's films – spanning both documentaries and narrative-driven works of documentary-like fiction – is the careful, quiet observation of people who have lost someone close to them. Unable (or unwilling) to forego the past and embrace the future, Koreeda's subjects simply exist, lingering in meditative, intermediate states of protracted limbo.

From the young widow in "Marborosi," his 1995 feature debut, to his follow-up, 1998's "After Life," which took place in a literal purgatory, and continuing on through 2004's "Nobody Knows," which focused on four young children who continue their daily routines as the 12-year-old eldest steps into an ultimately impossible paternal role after their mother abandons them, Koreeda has spent his career exploring memory and loss, filtered through his humanistic lens.

Midway through his latest Japanese-language drama, "Like Father, Like Son," the Prix du Jury winner at the 2013 Cannes International Film Festival, Midori (Ono Machiko) asks her 6-year-old son, "Shall the two of us run away somewhere?" Keita, the incredibly kind young boy, replies: "Where's somewhere?" "Somewhere nobody knows" comes the loving mother's reply, perhaps a deliberate nod to the title of Koreeda's 2004 masterpiece. Yagira Yuya, the fledgling actor who portrayed the 12-year-old protagonist of the earlier picture, was awarded Best Actor for his stunning turn at that year's Cannes. Ninomiya Keita, who plays the 6-year-old Keita in "Like Father, Like Son" may be half Yagira's then-age, but he's just as impressive a performer, as are all of the children in Koreeda's pictures. (Seek out 2011's "I Wish" for another lovely example of the filmmaker's magical way with children.) Midori is reacting to the situation that serves as the impossible moral dilemma at the center of the film, which depicts a professional-class couple who receive the devastating news that their son was switched at birth, and the child that they have raised is not their biological son, which is confirmed by a subsequent DNA test at the country hospital where the unfortunate switch took place six years earlier, when their "real" son was switched at birth with the child from a family of modest means.

Unlike "Nobody Knows" and "I Wish," pictures that deal with the consequences of fractured families, "Like Father, Like Son" places the emphasis on a father, Ryota, who is played by 44-year-old Fukuyama Masaharu, a popular singer-songwriter and TV actor. Now that this film has been seen by 2.5 million people in Japan (making this the most successful of all of Koreeda's films), the handsome talent has branched out to cinemas, at the risk of alienating his domestic fan base in a difficult and sometimes unsympathetic role that finds him struggling to become a better father and man faced with an uncertain future.

Until Koreeda became a father (he has a 5-year-old girl), he'd used children in his pictures as projections of himself. Having grown up a latchkey kid without a father, his experiences informed his films. 2006's "Hana" was about a fatherless samurai, while 2008's "Still Walking" found him charting new territory as he placed a troubled young father at the center of his story of a family grieving the drowning death of one of their own. But, as he's taken on the role and responsibilities of fatherhood, he's looked further inward, exploring not only when life is good with a father, but also when it isn't.

Examining what blood relations really mean makes for an impossible moral quandary here. Do you give up the child you've raised in favor of what's biologically yours? Culturally, Japan is decidedly not America, and adoption hasn't really caught on. The importance of bloodlines isn't to be discounted in the nation's patriarchal society, where heritage is deeply valued.

It may shock you when an administrator handling the case informs the two sets of parents – workaholic Ryota and neglected Midori, and disheveled appliance storekeeper Yudai (Franky Lily) and his far more elegant and grounded wife, Yukari (Maki Yoko) – that "ultimately, 100% of parents choose to 'exchange'" in these situations.

Yet Koreeda isn't one to necessarily follow the status quo, sharply criticizing the merciless, upwardly mobile mentality of the professional class, questioning the price children pay for parents' ambition and a culture that values materialism. No better is this displayed than when Ryota almost fatally offends Yudai and Yukari after months of friendly visits by offering to pay the struggling but happy couple, provided he can keep both Keita and his biological son, Ryusei (Hwang Shogen).

I won't say how things turn out (and is there really a good solution to this mess?), other than to state that in less capable hands, this conundrum might have taken twists and turns and forced awakenings, but given Koreeda's beginnings as a documentarian, he opts for the path less traveled, observing the situation in a manner that lets the viewer do some of the work.

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